Gala: Residency at LWDance Hub, Adelaide.

The concept for this piece was the result of research I did when I was artist in residency at WAM Festival in Faenza. My initial proposal to the festival director (Paola Ponti) was that I wanted to interview residents in Faenza about their everyday gestures. For example asking them how they express themselves through body language, what actions they repeat everyday, gestures that are specific to their region or ones that they identify with personally. I wanted to curate a body of gestures that I would construct a work out of. The director agreed to this approach and at the start of the residency, equipped with a translator and camera man, I started to collect material door to door. It soon became apparent to me that people were not in their homes during the day and in the evenings they were too busy with commitments to be interviewed, and as I had limited time I changed my approach. I took to the streets and noticing people were self concious when approached in this environment I decided to film scenes of people on the street in a documentary style without their knowledge. This was a very natural way to gather material, people were acting authentically and going about their business in their usual ways.

One thing that became important was that this would be a study; and therefor the material would be collected in an academic manner. I constructed a grid over a map of the city and my video footage spanned equally the whole city. I was not interested in movement that stood out from the everyday crowd but rather the details of the most normal ways people respond to their surroundings and each other. In this way it has its heart in social anthropology.
Afterward gathering the video footage, I learnt the material trying to stay as exact as possible to the original, and then constructed it as a long line of segmented movement sections. Some sections were several seconds and some were longer, they all began where the other left off but the tempo and quality changed from one to the next.
Because of the short time period of my residency, I wasn’t able to delve deep dramaturgically into this piece, I could only brush the surface, but I had very interesting feedback from the local audience. I had the sense that this performance was equally about what is not done then what is, by the way we don’t act as the way we do.

Gala is in residency at LWDance Hub in Adelaide, Australia and then in Rosas in Brussels, Belgium.

About Cie.OFEN

Since it’s formation in 2012, Cie.OFEN has created and produced 2 unique pieces One Final Evolutionary Note and The Vase. The former work saw Cie.OFEN selected as an Aerowaves priority company in 2014. Whilst continuing to tour these original 2 works, development has already began for Cie.OFEN’s next creation New People which premiers at the end of 2018.